Hillary Clinton Says She May Contest 2016 Election Loss

While many Hillary Clinton supporters are still sour about the loss their candidate suffered last November, especially given the fact that she received approximately 3 million more votes than her opponent, Donald J. Trump, most of them understand that the rules are the rules. It’s not the Electoral College they are so furious about. Instead it’s the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with a hostile foreign power in order to tilt the election away from Clinton and into Trump’s favor.

Although Robert Mueller has yet to prove such collusion, there does appear to be evidence that the Trump campaign, at the very least, attempted to collude with Russian officials in order to boost their chances of victory last November. Up until this week, Hillary Clinton had been relatively silent on such allegations against her opponent, but a new interview by NPR’s Terry Gross revealed that she not only has been following the investigation but that she may in fact challenge the election should Mueller and his team find evidence of collusion. The interview dialogue can be read below:

Gross: I want to get back to the question, would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?

Clinton: No. I would not. I would say —

Gross: You’re not going to rule it out.

Clinton: No, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Gross: So what are the means, like, this is totally unprecedented in every way —

Clinton: It is.

Gross: What would be the means to challenge it, if you thought it should be challenged?

Clinton: Basically I don’t believe there are. There are scholars, academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don’t think they’re on strong ground. But people are making those arguments. I just don’t think we have a mechanism. You know, the Kenya election was just overturned and really what’s interesting about that — and I hope somebody writes about it, Terry — the Kenyan election was also a project of Cambridge Analytica, the data company owned by the Mercer family that was instrumental in the Brexit vote.

There’s now an investigation going on in the U.K., because of the use of data and the weaponization of information. They were involved in the Trump campaign after he got the nomination, and I think that part of what happened is Mercer said to Trump, “We’ll help you, but you have to take Bannon as your campaign chief. You’ve got to take Kellyanne Conway and these other people who are basically Mercer protégés.”

And so we know that there was this connection. So what happened in Kenya, which I’m only beginning to delve into, is that the Supreme Court there said there are so many really unanswered and problematic questions, we’re going to throw the election out and redo it. We have no such provision in our country. And usually we don’t need it.

While Clinton’s comments will certainly excite her base, she also showed that she understands that even if Mueller proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election, it would be an incredibly steep hill to climb in order to overturn the results or force a new election altogether.